The Pro Applications Update 2008-004 (run Software Update) and the Red Final Cut Studio 2 Installer provide access to two new major features.

The first is rewrapping R3D data into QuickTime files that Final Cut can work with natively, though Final Cut’s Log & Transfer interface. There’s some debate about this, but as far as I can tell it appears to simply create QuickTime movies that are the equivalent of the existing QT proxy files, but self contained. This isn’t actually all that useful. (Why not just use the proxies? Rewrapping all the same data is just going double the amount of disk space your project uses for no good reason.)

The second feature is far more significant. Previously if you did a ‘Send to Color’ in on a Final Cut sequence containing containing Red proxies, you got… nothing. You got a bunch of clips on a timeline in Color that Color couldn’t do anything with. After installing this update, not only do proxies (and the new QT-wrapped files) show up in Color, but Color has access to the full raw data.

This workflow lets you edit immediately without any up-front transcoding, only requires you to transcode the exact frames you use in your final edit (they get transcoded as the footage gets rendered out of Color), allows you to create anything up to a DPX or uncompressed HD final deliverable without any previous step requiring you to work with uncompressed data, and provides access to the full range of the raw image capture by the camera in a grading environment significantly more powerful than RedCine.

While other workflows have offered some of these benefits, this is the first workflow which offers all of them at commodity prices. (Previously only SCRATCH offered all of this, and not at commodity prices.)

Now, there are a few caveats:

• As is fairly typical for this kind of dual-app edit/conform workflow, Color doesn’t render Final Cut video generators, filters, motion tab settings, or transitions other than dissolves. This isn’t as bad as it might sound, because these things aren’t typically used on feature film projects, and if you’re not editing a feature that’s being rendered to DPX, you can round-trip through Final Cut (do a ‘Send to Final Cut Pro’ in Color) and handle all of this back in Final Cut.

• Color only supports up to 2K. No 4K finishing from this workflow. 2K comes in as 2K. 3K, rather awkwardly, comes in as 1.5K, which I think Final Cut’s real-time engine has some issues with.

• I believe 4K footage through this workflow is rendered at the equivalent of the “half high” setting in Red’s other apps. It would be nice to have the option to have 2K scaled from a full 4K debayer as well.

• This new software hasn’t yet been tested extensively with Build 18 footage, or formats other than 4K 2:1 and 2K 2:1. I’ll be doing some tests with 4KHD this week. 4KHD is going to be important to this workflow because 4K footage comes in at half its native resolution (see above), so if you want to finish in 1080p, shooting 4K HD will make your life easier.

The Red Final Cut Studio 2 Installer linked above comes with a 24 page whitepaper on Red FCS workflow that lays all of this out in much more detail, if you’re interested.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 03:14 PM and is filed under Apple, Red, Software, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.